Beyond Ideology

“How alien this experience of total control is to our everyday existence in the chaotic, inexplicable universe. For just this reason, we fashion ideologies to live out our fantasies of control.”

What is ideology? How might we describe such a diverse thing? Let us begin with a rather simple definition: ideology is untruth. Or, perhaps more accurately, ideology is an active combatant against truth, a continual threat to truth. It is the chief sin of the intellectual life.

Ideologies are lifeless, sterile things. As soon as a truth takes the form of an ideology, it becomes petrified into fossilized, objective form. This has no life. Ideology corresponds to idolatry with God and objectification with humans. It cannot handle the expansiveness and mystery of life or of human beings, and so it cloisters itself in a flat, neatly controlled, easily comprehensible system that is both a degradation of truth and a straightforward lie. An ideology is a finite human creation that takes itself to be the final word on reality. Its task is to mark perimeters. It is inherently constraining. It comes pre-packaged with its good guys and bad guys, its right ideas and wrong ideas, and all of this determined solely in relation to the orthodoxy of “the system.” Its chief point of reference is this static world of “the system” rather than living truth. Ideologies build a safe wall to protect us from the fullness of reality. They can be mastered and controlled by finite beings and therein lies their comfort. How alien this experience of total control is to our everyday existence in the chaotic, inexplicable universe. For just this reason, we fashion ideologies to live out our fantasies of control.

And so, we have the paradox that the faithful one is often actually the rebel. Luther: the most faithful Catholic of them all; Christ: the most faithful Jew of them all. While others followed these traditions in static letter, the visionaries, those who received truth as individuals, as persons, followed them in living spirit. They refused to let ideology (the spiritless degradation of truth) suffocate truth in all its primal potency.

Fundamentalism is simply the fulfillment of ideology. Fundamentalism has rightly been called a sickness, but it is merely the most extreme stage of that more primary sickness of ideology. It is the foe of truth. Indeed, all real politics, religion, and intellectual endeavor must wage perpetual war against the spirit of ideology. At its best, it can serve as a helpful sign or tool, but it can too easily become confused with the fullness of reality. Such ideology is fit for mass-men, mere parts within a collective (as in fascism or communism), but it is incompatible with personhood, with individuals. The inestimable dignity and infinite potential of each person surpasses its claustrophobic constraints. We need only realize this truth to transcend its grip.